Innovacant

I'm sorry to harp on this two days in a row, but yesterday I discussed Mirror's Edge and my utter amazement that someone could not only call it innovative, but innovative enough that all other criticism should bounce off like marshmallows fired from those little marshmallow air shooter gun things.

I also mentioned earlier that in my youth, I was very concerned about the public perception comics and comics fans labored under. I wondered if there would ever come a time that comics as an art form could sit at the big boy table, it never occurring to me that the reason it wasn't already sitting at the big boy table after sixty years was that fifty five of those sixty years were filled with terrible shit.

These two assertions are going to have a head on collision at the main intersection of Tonight'sBlogville.

Videogames are at the tail end of one of the biggest, most relentless game release seasons the medium has ever had in its history. If Mirror's Edge can be called innovative amongst all those releases, do you realize how fucking easy it would be to create one of the most critically acclaimed videogames of all time? Of course you do, because chances are you're a videogame fan, and as such you probably have an idea that would kick the shit out of pretty much everything that was released this season. Despite what I was told when I was younger, the problem isn't a dearth of mind blowing ideas. Don't believe me? Go into any videogame forum. Start a post that says "If you could make any game at all a reality, what would it be?". Chances are at least half of those replies (if you're not making the post on an idiot factory like Gamefaqs) will be kickass gold. No, the problem is that no one with the reigns to anything important is listening or caring.

Hardly a week goes by that I don't see some article attacking videogames for something nonsensical, or some pinhead with a blog (ahem) waxing philosophical about narrative in games. I see articles at the big news sites about "the ten most powerful and important moments in games!" and it always pretty much boils down to talking about FF7, Shadow of the Colossus, and a handful of moments from ancient SNES RPG's that feature stilted dialog being spoken by expressionless, pixelated midgets. If you were like I was as a wee lad reading comics and wondering when games are going to sit at the big boy table culturally, well the answer would be when we stop pretending amatuer hour creativity and writing is something special, and start creating actual creative work like big boys and girls. See, I have a theory: Videogames now are where comics were in the early 90's: back then, comics focused on big titted, poorly proportioned ladies, impossibly huge, poorly proportioned men wielding big guns, nonsensical character designs (even from a superhero standpoint), and larger than life spectacle. What there was almost none of was any sort of character development whatsoever.

Sound familiar? Look at Gears of War. You slap a star eye and a metal arm on any one of those guys and they might as well be Cable. Today you're lucky if your main character says a fucking word. Say what you will about Force Unleashed, but at least the fucking thing had a pretty good story with a main character that actually talked.

Look at the highest regarded examples of our medium from recent memory. Aeristhshtshtshtths's death in Final Fantasy 7 is regarded as one of the most important, tear jerking deaths in all of gaming, and that scene is fucking ridiculous. No one emotes at all during the scene, not even Aeristhsthsth when she gets a fifteen foot katana plunged through her. This is mostly due to the fact that the scene is played out by what looks like marionette puppets with painted on faces, but even still the scene went down in history. Portal is regarded as an instant classic, immediately joining the pantheon of our best and brightest, and the game is like 3 fucking hours long. Don't get me wrong, it's a great time, but seriously look at what they did: Valve made a pretty innovative First Person puzzler, which would have been enough to get people to play it and enjoy it and give it pretty high praise. However, they went the extra mile and did something amazing: They hired a writer to create an actual character and give (her? it?) actual, well written, funny dialog. All of a sudden a solid 3 hour puzzler gets catapulted to game immortality, and all because someone decided to be genuinely funny and do their job. Mass Effect was lauded as having an incredible, epic story and hailed as the best game of that year, and Mass Effect's story was the kind of thing you'd find on a Sci-fi original movie. Quite frankly, the only reason that game wasn't torn fucking apart is that it was the only game made that year where, holy shit, you actually had conversations with people that you controlled and actually mattered (sort of). The best JRPG-style game I've played since Chrono Trigger is a fucking American made indie game called Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. Not only is it fucking hysterical, but it's genuinely a fun to play RPG adventure, and no one even paid these guys. They're not even professionals and what they did kicks the shit out of just about everyone who gets a paycheck for creating games these days. Shadow of the Colossus and its little brother Ico are works of art and breathtaking, but they're really little more than brilliantly illustrated fairy tales. Braid is one of the most critically acclaimed games in recent memory, the biggest argument for "games as art" probably ever made, yet the poetic interlude text is something that fell out of a pretentious college sophomore creative writing student's asshole. Bioshock was lauded as another game of the year contender, and had many accolades showered especially on its story. While it's probably the best example of story in a first person shooter, and while it does have a couple of truly epic moments, the story kind of falls apart at the end and the game as a whole largely gets by on a sense of atmosphere. Tim Schaefer's Psychonauts is lauded as a cult classic, a must play, and all he did was slap some genuinely funny characters and situations on a pretty run of the mill platformer.

You'll notice I didn't list anything from the 90's PC scene in there. That's because, at one point, PC gaming took storytelling and writing seriously. Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Deus Ex, Lucasarts point and clicks, Bioware's early outings... PC gaming was on the fast track to becoming interactive media that could stand tall against any modern book or movie, and then for some reason things went off the rails. It took a few years, but inexplicably 99% of that evaporated and all the PC scene was left with was either first person shooters that don't give a shit about anything but multiplayer or MMO's that are more interested in revenue stream than any storytelling. Videogames should be well, well beyond this trite garbage we have to put up with seriously in Gears of War and the like. We should be well beyond mute, faceless non-characters and Alien ripoffs.

What's the point of all this? The time is fucking ripe for someone to step up and make something truly spectacular, to finally take videogames as a medium seriously and bring some actual big boy writing to the table. The first person to actually create a genuinely funny and witty RPG (and I don't mean "nintendo saturday morning cartoon funny" or "Your little brother making fun of WoW on Youtube funny"), provided it has solid gameplay and graphics as well, will probably instantly win game of the year hands down. The first person to bring characters to an action game (not generic stereotypes, poorly written badass caricatures, or general archetypes fleshed out by a 14 year old), will probably go down in history as a creative genius. It seriously, honestly wouldn't be that hard to instantly become a gaming industry superstar, all you'd have to do is get hired onto a project that is semi-competent and not write a story that rips off Aliens featuring characters that just stepped off the U.S.S. Fanfiction.net.

Game producers, take note: Spend a little budget money hiring a fucking writer. I don't mean a friend of the lead programmer who took a creative writing class in college. I don't mean hire a guy to spruce up your short story about an alien invasion you wrote in middle school. I don't mean hire a comic writer who already has 14 things on his plate and just tosses out something for a paycheck. Hire someone talented who will take his time and give a shit.